Today's Story Line:

January 5, 2001

The Mideast peace process continues to teeter between breakthrough and collapse. One of the key issues on the table is the so-called "right of return" for Palestinian refugees and their families. What kind of a deal will they accept? In Jordan, which has the biggest Palestinian refugee population, opinions were sampled (page 1).

- David Clark Scott World editor

ONLINE IN THE ANDES: During a previous trip to Peru, the Monitor's Howard LaFranchi wrote about a fledgling e-business selling cakes that relies on Peru's network of public access Internet booths. On his latest trip, to Peru's Ayacucho province, he saw just how popular the network has become. "The streets of Ayacucho [the provincial capital] were lined with storefront Internet access sites with rows of computers offering Net access for as little as 40 cents an hour," Howard says. "Most customers were young people who couldn't afford a computer and phone line. But I also saw some elderly couples timidly entering the centers with an e-mail address jotted down on a slip of paper, the way they might have carried a letter into the post office."

THE BOOK CAME FIRST: Four former agents of Iran's Intelligence Ministry confessed in court this week to playing roles in the slayings of four writers and dissidents, state-run Tehran Radio reported. The four men are among 17 defendants standing trial for the 1998 killings. The Intelligence Ministry said they were "rogue agents." As we reported July 31, 2000, the details of political murders by an Intelligence Ministry death squad were written about in a bestselling book in Iran, "The Red Eminence and the Gray Eminences."